REPRESENTATION OF BREXIT IN PAKISTANI MEDIA: A CORPUS-ASSISTED CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Abstract
The withdrawal of Britain from the European Union in the politico-historical referendum of June 23rd, 2016 is a watershed event that has caught the attention of the media worldwide. The language used by Pakistani media to construct this politico-historical event is ideologically motivated. To-date, there is no evident study that has linguistically investigated Pakistani media coverage of Brexit. Therefore, this paper attempted to thoroughly examine Brexit in the Pakistani media and their vested interests. For this purpose, a corpus of 2m words was compiled from top three Pakistani English newspapers i.e. the Dawn, the News international, and the Express Tribune, in the time span of June 23th, 2016 till March 29th, 2019. The corpus was analyzed via Ant Conc software opted tools such as keyword list, collocates and concordance consecutively. Galtung and Ruge’s theory of news values and Stubbs’ discourse prosodies were applied to interpret the obtained results. The analysis reveals that Pakistani English newspapers have uniformly represented the Brexit issue in negative ways. Moreover, Brexit is highlighted that has immense economical repercussions not only for the Britain & EU but also for the international world. Particularly, Pakistan is more highlighted as Brexit’s affectee in terms of GSP-plus status package, remittances and exports.
